Miss Teen South Carolina

So I read the pithy boingboing post (http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/27/miss_south_carolina_.html) that led to the howler YouTube. I'm predicting at 5:49 pm EST today that this brief video will be watched a million times in the next couple of days, and that hapless Caitlin Upton will become a new kind of celebrity.

Appearing on boingboing can bring down servers, the traffic it gets. While I laughed loud and hard as the vibrant-blonde Miss Teen South Carolina stumbled between empty and vacuous as she answered a Very Simple Question, as I gtalked with my wife about it, I found myself fearing for her.

This YouTube is a scarlet A on her forehead, for "Airhead" -- for years, this 17-year-old will be referred to as a kind of geek code for the type -- perhaps as "Teh Caitlin" or as MTSC or simply as "that airhead blonde, miss whateverhernamewas."

Her "answer" will no doubt be shown or mentioned on Letterman, or the Daily Show, the Report, and her fame will spread further.

Perhaps she can leverage this fame into some kind of celebrity, but I think it's more likely that she will be living with this shame for years. And the faux face will be the one people recognize, and say "aren't you that girl from the YouTube?": the one she puts on for the cameras.

So she'll have to not wear makeup, to not be recognized as Teh Caitlin. Maybe she'll have to dye her hair a tawny brown. I actually hope that she's not really smart enough to realize how embarrassed she should be.

But it's also really interesting to think about the scarlet letter via YouTube: the macaca moment, the never-to-be-retrieved gaffe, never-to-be-forgotten. I'm seeing this more and more -- Tom Friedman's "suck on this" diatribe, explaining the Iraq war to Charlie Rose in 2003, is another example recently pulled up and spread around the blogosphere.

He's unlikely to pay the consequences that Teh Caitlin will, of course, but it will become an ever-more-normal thing to see -- people's past gaffes as easy to acquire as their present.

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From my conversation with my wife:

susan: It's hard to feel any sympathy... such a perfect example of why beauty pageants should be banned. Or maybe we should just ban dumb people from saying anything in public. That would probably be more effective.

me: yes, it would, but it would silence an entire industry.

susan: hmmm. And that would be bad because...?

me: just think, we would have people on the sidewalks with handlettered signs:

previously a pundit.

will wonk for food.

susan: wonks for me...

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Update: YouTube reports that more than 2 million people have viewed the clip -- I should have looked before I predicted. There are many, many instances of it, my favorite being the one with subtitles.

web 2.0v3 gleanings, part 2

Web 2.0, October 2005, was three times the size of the first conference -- too big, by my lights, but understandable, given the buzz around the meme that everyone and nobody understood.

This one was much more "about the money"; it was about venture capital, business models, and business structures. It was still hugely saturated with West Coast technorati. There was not much that spoke directly to publishing per se, but the conference still made important identifications of key themes that have been pretty predictive.

This 2005 Web2.0 v2 conference was mostly a refinement of the previous year, but given new urgency by the growth in "Web 2.0"-like stuff. Here are some notes I made last year:

-- huge: implications of the rise of the "prosumer" and "majority broadband"
-- also big: implications of the coming "boomlet"

web2.0: personal, engaged, "an architecture of participation," collaborative, web-centric applications, content delivery, and remixable systems.

Google 7.6B global searches (+74% Y/Y, 5/05); 384MM global unique visitors (+36%, 5/05) per comScore

Broadband 179MM global subscribers (+45% Y/Y, CQ2); 57MM in Asia; 45MM in N. America

Yahoo! 917MM streaming video (music.) sessions (+119% Y/Y, CQ4)

Digital Music 695MM cumulative iTunes as of 9/05; 6MM iPods sold in CQ2:05 (+295% Y/Y)

Personalization 40MM+ estimated My Yahoo! users

Tencent 16MM peak simultaneous Instant Message users, China, CQ2

Blogging: 27% of US Internet users read blogs, 11/04

Ringtones $3B annualized ringtone sales (Informa 5/05) - vs. $495MM cumulative iTunes sales (7/05)

www.morganstanley.com/techresearch
interesting meme: over time, for investor:
boomlet -> collapse -> boom

for technology:
boom -> collapse -> boomlet (check above URL to be sure).

Broadband in 42% of households

"We believe first ten years (1995-2005) of commercial Internet were a warm up act for what is about to happen"

Terry Semel -- personalization/portals

Open source obvious, inevitable, expected.

Business costs (development, license, staff requirements) down two orders of magnitude

"the idea of less as a competitive advantage"

"Prosumer"

Macromedia -> flash/html blend

Contrast with AJAX.

Gaming HUGE now.

Small applications can have huge implications

18.9 million people now publishing blogs

web 2.0v3 gleanings, part 1

I was at the first Web 2.0 conference, in November of 2004. Even at a few hundred people, is my recollection--it felt intimate, and exotic. Tim O'Reilly and co were trying to understand and co-invent something new -- through discussions, examples, and reflections.

Here's what I wrote in 2004 as part of a Board of Directors communication:

I recently attended a super-high-level conference (Web 2.0, The Web as Platform) put on by O’Reilly, and others. I was invited because I happened to be in Tim O’Reilly’s personal email list; I found myself in a San Francisco room of 300 venture capitalists, technologists, specialists, and others, with two days of presentations by luminaries. 90% of them could have bought and sold me; they were there to understand the future.

Among the 5-year trends identified which may pertain to [the foundation] (in no particular order):

a) Rise of the Blogosphere and Collaborative tools [a huge boost in web-centric arenas for sharing, discussing, and promoting information]: Tools are available that make collaboration/shared information between 20, 200, 20,000 participants is routine; 200,000 active participants is not unusual. Reputation, prestige, and value are all key commodities in this environment.

b) Digital imagery/Cell Phones: Oft-repeated is the fact that the biggest manufacturer of digital cameras is Nokia. Millions of cell phones are now being sold that have the digital capabilities of 18-month-old high-end digital cameras. Technologies for interpreting 100 cellphone images into a three-dimensional perspective of an event are now in development.

c) Geocaching: [Hundreds of thousands of people in loose Web community, identifying self-selected spots to “bury” a GPS (Global Positioning System)-located treasure (like a Pez dispenser) that a total stranger “finds” by GPS location, hiking hither and thither, and replaces with something (say, a 1898 Indian Head Penny). Geocacher reports on it into “geocache space,” often with digital imagery.

d) RSS, and similar machine-to-machine communication, and its implications. [RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication: a simple XML structure for communicating title, description, blurb, URL, time, etc. RSS is used by many “consolidating machines” to gather hundreds (even tens of thousands) of “RSS Feeds.”]

e) Voice Over IP: certain to become a key technology; Skype is usually used as the exemplar. JRS: by 2008, always-on sound and images from our biodiversity projects, connected, explorable.

f) Communications technologies overall (satellite/GPS/broadband/wireless): JRS: If we know “communications is not the bottleneck,” how do we optimize place/time/condition recording to maximize biodiversity value?

g) Specialty community-building, independent of geography, using Skype/AIM/Blogs/RSS/etc.: [1,000 people being paid $1,000 to provide best-guess info, or digital imagery, or personal analysis, via Web-based community, may be more valuable than 1 small org being paid $1,000,000 to do the same. Look at blogs; look at listservs, look at newsgroups; look at targeted sites; look at common-interest support; look at MoveOn.com, look at “secondary info” reanalysis.

h) Open Source, open access, common standards, meta-information: Voluntary, self-interested, open-minded communities can share best practices w/o institutional oversight, and do more better than a well-funded corporation, especially in arenas where $ is not the driver. JRS: how could we encourage and support Biodiversity-focused developments?

Most of the above worked out as being pretty darn good predictors. More on the 2005 and 2006 Web 2.0 conference/summit soon.

Technorati "State of Blogosphere" October 2006

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000443.html

Great data from Technorati, one of the best "blog analyst" systems out there.

Especially interesting is the "high-authority" vs "low-authority" based on links from other blogs -- I wonder, if the National Academies can address the institutional concerns sufficiently to have a blog, where our blog would end up in terms of authority.

The conclusion of six years of transition

I belong to a Board of what once was a nonprofit publisher, which, because it was spiraling down from bad strategies about digital publishing (like, ignoring them at a time when the competition was "getting it"), was in 2000 clearly in trouble.

It's an all-volunteer Board. Not one of us is paid, or has any finances bound up in the success or failure of the company. But we shared a common belief in the value of the company. We had to decide what to do with an information company that, it was clear to us, would implode if something wasn't done. Seventy-five years of nonprofit success might turn into faded memories.

We wanted to find the Right Home for this historic record, and we were willing to sell it for $1, to the right longterm owner of the resources, if that was the optimal path. It was a 75-year-old company, holding a unique resource. After a processs of consultants, and interim directors, and strategies for salvation, and after a long, intense courtship by 10 possible resulting owners, we ended up selling the company.

At every stage we had disagreements over Big Theme issues: profit + nonprofit, open + closed access, public + private mission, academic + commercial drivers, fast burn + in perpetuity, and much more. We tussled over Grand Visions regarding what kinds of information wanted to be free, and our responsibility to make them so -- or our responsibility to the information already gathered, to make them integrated with other existing information sets.

We ended up selling to not the highest bidder, but for enough that after several years, we are now a foundation that requires that about a million dollars a year be granted, for biodiversity information projects in the developing world. It's been six fascinating and maddening years for me -- though the initial upheavals had begun a year before I joined the Board.

This Board has formed a fierce camaraderie-by-fire because of all of us struggling over those Big Themes over the last six years, each from different and unique vantage points. The Board is made of library folks and specialists and publishers and geeks and businessfolk -- a very diverse set of really smart people -- and we all tried to do the Right Thing, to match the original intent of the founders, and then to craft a new mission for a new context that fit that intent, for the new realities of the new century. By consensus, and by vote, and by discussion.

These last two days, we've finally come to our new fruition -- we had actual projects to consider, and funding decisions to be made for 2007. We're going to be doing a lot of good, in an underfunded arena, to help specialists record, and humanity understand, the biodiversity of the developing world a little bit better.

During the Board meeting, we also got a presentation from the folks we sold the old company to, two years ago. They are now doing what we would have been doing if we had had the money and management vision six years before, but better. It was very satisfying to see our information getting integrated with other information resources, to enrich scientists' understanding, and improve science.

We saved the company by letting it be absorbed by another. *And* we are doing a lot of good with the results of the sale. More good overall is being done than the original company was doing. It's very satisfying.

I learned *so much* from these guys. Librarians have a different perspective than a publisher, or than has a CEO of a digital business, or that has a corporate scientist, or an academic, or the head of an information NGO. I learned about how information is treated and valued in different communities, how our habits of thinking inform our scope of vision, how business models dictate practice, and again, much more. What a great group, and what a hard, worthwhile six years.

I've got three years more to go on the Board, so I get to enjoy the most fun part: funding great stuff, helping make great projects go with the grease of money.

Tonight we said goodbye to two Board members who led us through the six-year wilderness as sequential Chairs, and it was sad to bid them goodbye, but glorious to look back on what we did and where we were.

They both knew, as they were being toasted and cheered by the other members of the board (the only people who knew what we and they had been through), that they'd been part of something bigger than themselves, a project that was making a tangible difference in the world, and that we had hauled from potential collapse, into a successful conclusion, through disagreement to discussion to consensus through conclusion, from the left side to the right side of the Value Chain, from the brink of the abyss to a hyperpositive end point.

Man. What a great thing.